Category Archives: Weekly Parasha

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The parshiyot about the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, could be be fascinating for a certain kind of reader. A sample from early in our parashah:

And let all among you who are skilled come and make all that God has commanded: the Tabernacle, its tent and its covering, its clasps and its planks, its bars, its posts, and its sockets; the ark and its poles, the cover, and the curtain for the screen; the table, and its poles and all its utensils; and the bread of display; the lampstand for lighting, its furnishings and its lamps, and the oil for lighting; the altar of incense and its poles; the anointing oil and the aromatic incense; and the entrance screen for the entrance of the Tabernacle; the altar of burnt offering, its copper grating, its poles, and all its furnishings … (Exod. 35:10-16)

Though for many of us, it’s… a bit … much. Richard Elliott Friedman, notes that the Torah has more about the Mishkan and its contents than any other topic. (Commentary on the Torah,255-256) And for what? In fact, as Yonatan ben David of Haifa university notes, even if you’re looking at the Torah contextually, without our modern lens, it’s counter-intuitive that God would—or would want to—“dwell in a human-made structure”, especially considering the concerns that God expresses in Leviticus (and in our maftir) about all the varieties of human ritual impurity.Continue reading →

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There sure is a lot a of singing at this time of year! Between the choral extravaganzas of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we read a song that Moses himself sung, Shirat Haazinu. Reading much like some of the prophets who come later, Haazinu depicts “Israel as a perfidious child” in Jeffrey Tigay’s words (JPS Commentary, 510), who disobeys God, is punished, but finally attains redemption.

Songs, of course, are not uncommon in the Bible. The Midrash on the account of crossing the Red Sea informs us that there are ten songs that “the Israelites sang to God.” (Tanhuma Beshallah 10) Though there are plenty more instances of singing in the narratives of the Tenakh, and many, many more songs when you consider even just the 150 chapters in the book of Psalms, the Midrash chose ten of particular significance, and Ha’azinu is amongst them.Continue reading →

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Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. . . . When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps.

Three times in Parashat Eikev, we are instructed to walk in God’s paths (Deut. 8:6, 10:12, 11:22). The context clearly indicates the meaning of the phrase: the Torah is telling us to observe its laws. In fact, the same root as the verb walk, ה.ל.כ, is found in halakhah (הלכה), Jewish law. Perhaps, then, walking can teach us something about what following Jewish law might look like.

Two sections of our parashah (Num. 4:21-49, 7:1-9) deal with the instructions to the Levite clans responsible for transporting the Mishkan (Tabernacle). The tales of these contemporary refugees’ packs remind us just how remarkable it is that the Israelites carried substantial (and seemingly nonessential) structures through the wilderness.

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Abraham — knight of faith. Was willing to leave his home and be the first to swear fealty to the one God.Isaac — gentle peacemaker. Builder of altars and digger of wells in the Land.Jacob — cunning fighter. Wrestled with God and established a people.

So God made and affirmed covenants with them. None was perfect, but they had their virtues, and God singled them out, protected them, and maintained a special relationship with them. So far, so good. But then in our parashah, God says about the whole people:

וְלָקַחְתִּי אֶתְכֶם לִי לְעָם וְהָיִיתִי לָכֶם לֵאלֹהִים

and I will take you to Me for a people, and I will be to you a God (Ex 6:7)

This national covenant was promised to Abraham and his descendants, but now is its time. And even the least worthy of Israel is seemingly included.

The question is: why? What can possibly be special about all Israel to make us deserving of this covenant?Continue reading →

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Galactic wreckage in Stephan’s Quintet, in the constellation of Pegasus, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope from 300 million light years away.Source: spacetelescope.org/images/heic0910i;credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team.

As Jacob sleeps, he sees a ladder with its base on the ground and its top touching the heavens (Gen. 28:12). The seemingly unreachable realm above the earth, Jacob discovers, is actually relatively accessible, almost within our grasp. The images from the Hubble Space Telescope—and space exploration more broadly—play a similar role for us. One might have expected that humanity’s newly found ability to discover more about space would have blunted our sense of wonder, as more and more of the universe ceases to be so mysterious.

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How often do we hear the sound or feel the vibrations of a mobile device demanding our attention? Breaking news, emails, traffic, and game updates—alerts both trivial and critical are brought to us by beeps, bars of music, and buzzes.

Although the medium may be new, the need to communicate across distances is not. Numbers 10:1–10 directs the making and usage of a pair of silver trumpets—not musical instruments, but sirens, calling Israelites to assemble, instructing them to travel in formation, alerting them to enemy attack and to holidays and sacrificial rites.

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The metal bovine with a peculiar magnetism that is known as the Golden Calf (Exod. 32) brings to mind Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull (1989). A potent Financial District icon, it exerts a remarkable pull on passersby (on its webcam you can see the crowd so often around the statue). According to the artist’s website, it was designed as a “symbol of virility and courage” and “the perfect antidote to the Wall Street crash of 1986,” but it was also created without the invitation of the Wall Street community and was promptly removed from its original location in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

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What was it like in the very beginning? As if to emphasise that no-one knows for sure, our parashah offers two distinct perspectives.

In the first few verses of the Torah, the earth is tohu va-vohu. Biblical scholar Richard E. Friedman half-jokingly translates these two rhyming words with one basic meaning as “chaos shmaos”. There is also darkness, tumult and the primordial matter in this account is water, which is fluid and without form. As the days of creation proceed, God tempers the darkness with light, separates out the matter into earth and sky, land and sea, day and night. Each of the categories of plants and animals is created to populate this new world, “lemino” — according to its species. Humanity, with its diversity of genders, and then, at the culmination of these six days, shabbat is created, and we have what we call a week. The week is entirely artificial. Whereas years are a response to the passage of seasons; months–to the cycle of the moon, weeks are imposed as a way to organise and order our lives. Thus the Creation is complete–from absolute chaos to total order.Continue reading →

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Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau, the City of Refuge, on Hawaii’s Big Island was functional into the early 19th century, when kapu, Hawaii’s system of ritual taboos, was overturned by King Kamehameha II. Until that time, many breaches of the kapu could result in death, including for an offence as ephemeral as allowing your shadow to fall over a chief’s house. However, by entering a pu`uhonua(a place of refuge), often by swimming across a bay, and performing a ritual facilitated by the priest there, the punishment could be annulled.